Friday, March 26, 2010

Goniffs

In the great Miller's Crossing, Joel and Ethan Coen have the hero observe this about the Jewish siblings around whom the plot turns, "She's a grifter, just like her brother. They probably had grifter parents and grifter grandparents and someday they'll each spawn little grifter kids."

Myrna Birnbaum, spoken of here, sounds a little like Sarah Palin, only she finally is shown to be a tart with a heart, too much heart to finally pull the trigger on her detractor.

I wonder, still, if there are odd family traditions of what we goyim call "grifting" in Jewish communities, a legacies of shady operation passed down from father to son and daughter. In any case, I know this: the word often associated with the Cantor clan in the Richmond, Virginia, Jewish community where Eric Cantor gew up is gonif -- which apparently is something between an outright thief and a shady operator. The word doesn't seem misapplied to Eric when you consider all the cash the banksters funnel to him through his wife the bagman/lobbyist.

This morning I awoke to hear local News Channel 8 telling Washingtonians that both Republicans and Democrats were getting threats of violence over the passage of health care reform. A moronic blonde bimbette catapulted this propaganda for Cantor. According to the station's website, yesterday Cantor came out with this:

"A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week, and I've received threatening e-mails." Cantor said. He refused to release details, however, saying it would only encourage more threats, and refused to take questions.

According to the website, the Richmond PD, not a notoriously liberal outift (believe me), say this however:

Later Thursday, however, Richmond police said in a news release that the bullet had been fired into the air around 1 a.m. Tuesday. It finished its arc back to earth at a sharp downward trajectory, breaking a window pane on the bottom floor of the two-story brick building where Cantor's campaign leases the top floor.

So a bullet fired at random and spending its last energy on a building where Cantor has very infrequently gone, somehow becomes an attack on his politics, proving to the bimbette, that, despite what her own station's wensite publishes, there is (as usual) equal wrong on both sides.

Now there is a story here, and that is that the Minority Whip got caught in a deliberate, obvious, and preposterous lie, which he was telling to make political hay, but that is not the story our on-air "journalists "want to tell.

Journalism is not even writing any more. They just mix up a cocktail of rumor, propaganda, superstition and statistics into a he-said/she-said controversy and call it news. No need to worry about the truth of the matter. That seems like kind of a grift to me.